Counter-terrorism since 9/11 By Andrew C. McCarthy
Criminals or combatants?
The debacle in Afghanistan returns the United States to our pre-9/11 threat environment. In fact, the threats are arguably worse. It would be an overstatement, though, to conclude that we are back to the state of vulnerability that obtained on September 10, 2001. Our counter-terrorism is markedly superior today. That is cause for guarded optimism but not overconfidence. In many ways, it is a reflection of how bad things were prior to 9/11. While national security has dramatically improved since then, there is serious backsliding.
Let’s be precise about why we undertook the effort that has now unspooled into a disaster. When American armed forces were dispatched to Afghanistan in October 2001, the essential mission was threefold. The oft-forgotten first part was to shift the U.S. counter-terrorism paradigm from a law-enforcement model to a war footing.
Second, and most obvious, was to rout al-Qaeda, which had conducted the 9/11 atrocities. From the terror network’s hub, particularly in the Afghan–Pakistani border region (though it had strongholds throughout the country), al-Qaeda orchestrated the attacks in which nearly 3,000 Americans were killed. In nearly simultaneous suicide-hijacking strikes, a total of 19 trained jihadists destroyed the iconic World Trade Center and badly damaged a section of the Pentagon; another plane they’d seized, Flight 93, crash-landed near Shanksville, Pa., thanks to the extraordinary valor of the doomed passengers and crew, rather than plowing into the U.S. Capitol or the White House as jihadists are believed to have intended.
The third mission, the most enduring and thus the most difficult, was to ensure that the terror network was denied sanctuary and state sponsorship, which in Afghanistan had evolved into active military alliance with a like-minded regime, the Taliban.
The 9/11 operation had not been a one-off. Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s emir, had established the organization in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s. After a humiliated Red Army withdrew in 1989 (with the USSR’s collapse imminent), bin Laden took the jihad global, targeting the United States — the “head of the snake,” as we were branded by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the bin Laden mentor and jihadist firebrand I prosecuted in the mid 1990s after the cell he’d established bombed the Twin Towers and plotted (unsuccessfully) simultaneous attacks on New York City landmarks. For a time in the early Nineties, al-Qaeda relocated to Sudan. By 1996, though, it had been enticed back to Afghanistan after that country’s takeover by the Taliban — a sharia-supremacist faction that had been forged by Islamist elements in the Pakistani regime as a geopolitical weapon to control its Afghan neighbor while countering rival India. In the five ensuing years, al-Qaeda constantly conspired to attack American targets, occasionally with horrific success: In 1998, the jihadists bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing over 200; and in 2000, they nearly sank a naval destroyer, the USS Cole, killing 17 American sailors.
The lesson, which American officials failed to learn throughout the Nineties, was that U.S. facilities around the world, and our homeland itself, would be susceptible to mass-murder strikes if jihadist organizations were permitted to have not only government support but also safe havens to establish stable command-and-control, training camps, weapons depots, and funding channels.
Invading American forces — mostly a modest deployment of special forces and airpower, aligned with warlords in northern Afghanistan — deposed the Taliban and wiped out al-Qaeda, though many of its leaders escaped into Iran and Pakistan. But the task of denying safe haven to jihadist groups was and remains a long-term challenge.
It was always apparent that the so-called War on Terror could not be won in Afghanistan (or, later, in Iraq). Transcontinental jihadist networks have cells in various countries. It would remain our burden to keep them on the run. This was the solid rationale for the Bush doctrine: President George W. Bush’s admonition that governments must decide whether to side with us or with the terrorists. The warning was that we would hit anti-American terror cells wherever they operated if the host governments did not tend to the problem themselves.
Unfortunately, though this principle remains essential to national security, public support for the Bush doctrine flagged. The Bush administration allowed it to be superseded by an ill-conceived experiment in democracy-building — which, if it ever could take root in fundamentalist Islamic cultures, would take generations and require astronomical expense. The American public never supported and in fact came to deride the sharia-democracy project as its supposed nexus to our national security became ever harder to discern. Nation-building was particularly discredited by the Iraq War: The nexus between Saddam Hussein’s regime and terrorists was not as obvious as in Afghanistan; the U.S. never found, in the predicted quantities, the mass-destruction weapons that were proffered as the basis for the U.S. invasion of Iraq; and Shiite Iran, which was supporting anti-American jihadism with impunity, was strengthened by the ouster of Sunni Saddam and his being supplanted by a Shiite “democratic” regime that Tehran then bent to its will.
Americans became susceptible to the appeal of populist tirades against seemingly endless American military excursions in hostile lands on behalf of ungrateful populations — “forever wars.” This demagoguery has been profoundly damaging. Our essential security need, despite a surfeit of preening rhetoric, was never selfless nation-building; it was counter-terrorism. This should have been patent when President Obama prematurely pulled out of Iraq. The terror threat was exacerbated when, in the absence of American forces, ISIS — a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda — metastasized into a self-declared caliphate that, before finally being rolled back by a reluctant American redeployment, controlled territory in Mesopotamia larger than Britain.
Nevertheless, both the Trump and the Biden administrations were determined to end even the modest commitment of forces we’d kept in Afghanistan — a number that had steadily declined since 2014, when the mission had been converted from wartime combat to counter-terrorism and the training of Afghan forces. Heedlessly, Trump and Biden pulled out knowing that (a) the Taliban would retake the country, (b) al-Qaeda had never been defeated and had grown more supple and adept since bin Laden’s killing in 2011, (c) ISIS and other jihadist factions were certain to exploit the territorial sanctuary provided by a sharia-supremacist government, and (d) China and Russia had grown stronger since 9/11 and were now sure to provide cover for anti-American mischief — to say nothing of the fact that Iran already had a collaborative relationship with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in anti-American operations.
The Taliban’s retaking of Afghanistan is a blow to our national security, then, because jihadist networks that continue to consider themselves at war with us have greater resources and more safe harbor than they had prior to 9/11 — particularly after the Biden administration’s mind-boggling incompetence in abandoning to the Taliban a sizeable chunk of the $28 billion in weaponry our government had provided to Afghan security forces since 2002.
We thus face more overseas peril than we have at any time in the last 20 years. But our counter-terrorism defenses, especially homeland security, are night-and-day better than they were on 9/11. The Bush administration improved our counter-terrorism paradigm in two critical ways.
First, our basic approach to anti-American jihadism was converted. Throughout the Clinton years — from the 1993 Trade Center bombing through the 2000 Cole bombing — terrorism was, as noted above, regarded as a criminal-justice issue, the main response to attacks being courtroom prosecution. This was irresponsible. The mass-murder attacks against us were acts of war, by jihadists who enjoyed financial, matériel, and logistical support from rogue Islamist regimes. To respond with indictments and nearly nothing else was provocative weakness.
Further, the attacks were choreographed from hostile nations where our law-enforcement agencies do not operate and the writ of our courts does not run. Jihadists often strike in suicide attacks, such as 9/11, after which there is no one left to prosecute. Even when terrorists and their masters are left alive, they are usually unreachable by criminal justice. To take just one example, Ayman Zawahiri, bin Laden’s successor and the current emir of al-Qaeda, has been under Justice Department indictment for nearly a quarter century; bin Laden and such other 9/11 master-plotters as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) were captured or killed by the armed forces, not the FBI.
The U.S. policy decision to make criminal prosecution the point of the counter-terrorism spear was a coup for foreign terrorists. They not only enjoyed practical immunity. The prosecutions that did occur in the Clinton years were an intelligence banquet for al-Qaeda, as due-process rules required the government to provide to Qaeda-allied defendants discovery of sensitive investigative files over which the terror network pored. We were operating in the dark while giving the enemy a window into our (woefully inadequate) database.
When Bush deployed the armed forces, international terrorism became principally a national-security issue, not a crime problem. The governmental response was led by military and intelligence officials, with the Justice Department confined to a support role, mainly in prosecuting persons and entities that provided material support to jihadists, much as the Treasury Department tracked and cut off terror-funding channels.
Criminal due process was supplemented by the law of war, which permits the killing of enemy combatants encountered on the battlefield as well as their capture and detention without trial. (An effort to try foreign terrorists by military commission has been a failure, with the outrageous result that KSM and his co-conspirators, though captured nearly two decades ago, have yet to stand trial.) There were still civilian terror prosecutions, but they tended to focus on U.S.-based jihadists who, though “inspired” by overseas terror networks, were not “operationally” directed by them. As a result of the changed approach, American forces over the last 20 years have killed or captured thousands of jihadists — often more in a day than the fewer than three dozen our government managed to prosecute from 1993 to 2001.
The other major counter-terrorism improvement is information-sharing among government agencies. Prior to the 1993 Trade Center bombing, there had been few terrorism prosecutions. To the extent there had been investigations, they had been handled by the FBI’s foreign-counterintelligence (FCI) division, which mainly monitored suspected spies. The FBI and the CIA were notoriously antagonistic toward each other, not only reluctant to share intelligence but acting at cross-purposes — e.g., when the CIA was backing the mujahideen against the Soviets, the FBI was conducting a criminal investigation of groups that recruited and trained young Muslims to join the jihad in Afghanistan.
In the mid Nineties, things became even more dysfunctional. The Clinton Justice Department was seized by the fear that criminal investigators would pretextually exploit the FBI’s foreign-intelligence surveillance authorities to spy on criminal suspects against whom they had scant evidence (a concern that was hypothetical at the time but has become empirical owing to the bureau’s deeply flawed “Russiagate” investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign). The DOJ’s cure, alas, was far worse than the potential abuse: a set of procedures, infamously known as “the wall,” which essentially barred intelligence agents and criminal investigators from sharing information. This self-blinding had predictably horrific consequences when, in the worst example, headquarters in August 2001 forbade the bureau’s criminal division to help FCI agents locate two suspected terrorists; the pair ended up in the five-man jihadist team that flew Flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Following 9/11, the Bush administration dismantled the wall, a change Congress quickly codified. That was in the Patriot Act, which, for all its claimed excesses, facilitated “connecting of the dots” by mandating intelligence-sharing and making the dots easier to find — mainly by making available to the FCI division (rebranded the national-security division) information-collection techniques that had long been used by criminal investigators (e.g., special court orders and demand letters that are the functional equivalents of grand-jury subpoenas).
In the ensuing years, there has been exponential improvement in governmental intelligence cooperation across the board: from municipal and state law enforcement to the FBI’s criminal and intelligence agents to such intelligence agencies as the CIA, NSA, and DIA. The nation has not suffered a reprise of 9/11-dimension attacks because they require extensive preparation and communication. Our counter-terrorism emphasis on aggressive intelligence collection and analysis does not mean we are invulnerable to such attacks, but they are far more difficult to pull off than they were 20 years ago.
We should take comfort in that but not too much. Just as domestic policing and prosecution have come under withering criticism by the odd alliance of progressive grievance organizations, extremist libertarians, and Trump populists, so, too, has counterintelligence. In recent years, the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) have been revised to make intelligence-gathering more difficult, even overseas. Such overkill as the TSA inspection regimes at airports (which penalize the law-abiding while fighting the last war), as well as the abuses of the FISA process by the FBI and Justice Department, heightens the potential of additional curtailments. Hopefully, events in Afghanistan will make Congress think twice about that.
Meanwhile, in their haste to pull out of the Middle East and Afghanistan and end “forever wars,” the last three administrations have overlooked two key aspects of counter-terrorism.
First, if the war is over, so is justification for applying the law of war. If we can no longer lawfully kill, capture, and detain terrorists without trial, we are effectively back to the pre-9/11 criminal-justice paradigm. Experience teaches that this undermines our security. The problem has been exacerbated by Obama/Biden policies: (a) a decided preference for criminal prosecution over military detention of foreign terrorists; and (b) a courtship of Muslim activist organizations (an important Democratic constituency, despite ties to the Muslim Brotherhood), which evolved into a strategy — “Countering Violent Extremism” — that admonishes investigators against focusing on the sharia-supremacist ideology that catalyzes jihadism. Overall, this approach prioritizes prosecution after attacks have happened over intelligence-gathering that prevents attacks from happening. Inexorably, terrorist attacks become more likely.
Second, of course, is the retreat from the counter-terrorism mission of denying sanctuary to jihadists, especially in countries where they have active partnership with sharia-supremacist regimes, such as Iran and — now, once again — Afghanistan. The success of our post-9/11 counter-terrorism approach has depended on effective intelligence collection and the capacity to kill and capture jihadists before they execute their heinous plots. But most vital has been ensuring that foreign terrorist organizations do not have state-sponsored safe haven. When they enjoy the insulation needed to plan and train, needed to wage war, it becomes infinitely more difficult to gather intelligence and kill or capture jihadists before they strike.
Real homeland defense and the safety of American facilities across the globe result from the symmetry of these objectives and their simultaneous pursuit. To neglect any one — and to abide terrorist sanctuaries is to neglect the most essential one — is to degrade counter-terrorism overall. Our national security is not in the same dire straits as it was on September 10, 2001, but the downward spiral should alarm every American.
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